With 2018 heading to a close at the digital age’s usual breakneck speed, we have been fortunate enough as UX designers and User Interface (UI) developers to be more involved than ever in the process of product design. Businesses now recognise the importance of audience research, A/B testing and pattern libraries when designing and constructing the best user experience. So equally, we must now recognise the importance of overall business realities in helping to determine where we should focus our UX energy.

Some of our latest developments at CoreStream have touched on the trends we have seen evolve in UX, including voice interactions and responses, such as in the Safety Step-Up App. Our incident reporting process in the app is currently voice driven and will soon become conversational as the system grows to be able to interpret what you are saying and ask follow-up questions. Longer term, this will move to another of 2018’s growing trends, Zero UI interfaces, by taking advantage of platforms like Amazon’s Alexa. Zero UI systems and other non-traditional interfaces such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) force us to rethink how we design user experiences and require an even broader understanding of our audience to succeed.

In our main platform, the new features are heavily focused on reacting to all we have learned over the years about our users and the right UX for them, taking care and time to make the input of information as frictionless as possible. Some of our clients require large, complex workflows, but equally require the same level of immediacy and ease of use they receive in other areas of their digital lives. This requires clever planning, action signposting and journey planning to allow us to improve our clients’ experience of our platform, while still providing the advanced features they need when they need it. A clean minimalist look, high-speed load times and informative motion are just some of the results we have achieved so far. We’re excited to see what challenges 2019 will bring us, and we will look forward to providing you with the latest updates.

Ben Gallienne
Head of Front-End Architecture